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A Fish, Er, Storm Named Nemo

By Brian Stelter February 7, 2013 6:45 pmFebruary 7, 2013 6:45 pm

1:39 p.m. | Updated “We’re ready for Nemo,” the Twitter account for the New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg asserted on Thursday before listing all the tools at the city’s disposal for the blizzard that is bearing down on the Northeast.

Wait — Nemo?

Yes, The Weather Channel’s new names for winter storms are catching on, much to the chagrin of the National Weather Service, which has advised its forecasters not to follow the channel’s lead. But some airlines, governors’ offices and media outlets are all playing along, publishing advisories with the Nemo name.

Seriously, though. Nemo?

So far this winter weather season, The Weather Channel has bestowed storms with names like Athena, Caesar, Freyr, Iago, and Kahn. This one — bringing to mind the adorable orange fishie in the Disney/Pixar film “Finding Nemo” — is the funniest yet. The jokes are flying as fast as the snow is forecast to fall. “They have named this new Nor’easter Nemo. I am not looking for it,” wrote the actor and comedian Albert Brooks on Twitter.

“Nemo” — if we can call it that, for the purposes of this article — was one of the top nationwide trends on Twitter on Friday. There’s been a spike in Google searches of the term, too. It’s a rather incongruous name, given that the impending blizzard is likely to be the biggest such storm that the Northeast has seen in several years. But “Jaws” isn’t a possibility; The Weather Channel isn’t weighing a name change. The winter storm names were all announced last November and are assigned in alphabetical order.

Besides, “Nemo is a Latin word,” explained Bryan Norcross, the channel meteorologist who helped conceive the storm-naming last year. The word means “no one” or “no man.” He said that derivation, not “Finding Nemo,” was part of the inspiration for the name.

Captain Nemo, the famous Jules Verne character from “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” also came up when the channel was brainstorming. “Captain Nemo was a pretty tough, fierce guy,” Mr. Norcross said.

Many reporters and weather experts continue to roll their eyes at the channel’s storm-naming, just as they did when the plan was announced last November. It’s widely viewed as a marketing ploy, even though some skeptics admit that the names help raise awareness about storms. On Thursday, a National Weather Service spokesman reiterated, “We never have, nor do we have any plans to consider naming winter storms.”

Mr. Norcross, for his part, said “the names are working well.”

“We expected that some people would pick it up because there’s a common sense aspect to this,” he said, adding that “in Europe they’ve been naming storms for over fifty years.”

This blizzard is the 14th named storm by the channel. “We’re a little ahead of our expectations,” Mr. Norcross said. “There have been a number of intense but fairly short-lived storms this year, unlike last year where we figure we would have only named about seven. Each season is different.”

He mentioned another common-sense reason for the names: “The fact is that Twitter needs a hashtag.”

For the record, the channel’s next names are Orko, Plato and Q. On Friday morning The Weather Channel declared that Orko had been born: it will affect North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Minnesota this weekend.